


At Your Finger Ends

by tartanfics



Category: Oxford Time Travel Universe - Connie Willis, Sherlock (TV)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Fusion, Angst, Crossover, Episode Remix, Gen, Time Travel
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2011-07-22
Updated: 2011-07-22
Packaged: 2017-10-21 16:11:27
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 7,376
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/227099
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/tartanfics/pseuds/tartanfics
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p><i>John has always wanted to be a historian. He was born in 2020, so he grew up hearing about developments in time travel technology and theory. For John, history is mostly about the adventure.</i> Fusionfic with Connie Willis’s Oxford University time travel novels (<i>Doomsday Book, To Say Nothing of the Dog</i>, etc.), which you don’t need to have read to understand this. John is a time traveller from Oxford 2059 who gets stuck in London in 2009.</p>
            </blockquote>





	At Your Finger Ends

**Author's Note:**

> See the end for some notes re: AU, possible sequel, and the title. Beta by [](http://miss-sabre.livejournal.com/profile)[ **miss_sabre**](http://miss-sabre.livejournal.com/) .

John wakes up gasping, disoriented, out of place and out of time in a single bed. He remembers pain and bright sunlight, and the sickening cold fear that crept into his stomach when he realized he was stuck in 2009.

-

John has always wanted to be a historian. He was born in 2020, so he grew up hearing about developments in time travel technology and theory, went to his school librarian to ask if she had any books about it. He always wanted to go to Oxford. They have the best history department, the most advanced time travel tech.

History is about knowing how people used to live and knowing who they were, of course, but for John, it’s mostly about the adventure.

-

He sits on the edge of his bed, looking at the meeting between wall and ceiling, _hating_ history.

He has a therapist who thinks he has a psychosomatic limp and PTSD and trust issues--of course he has trust issues; he can’t tell anyone he’s not who he says he is. Not to mention the limp itself and the way his shoulder hurts when he pulls his arm back too sharply.

John is angry and frustrated and trapped. He knows that if he were _not_ trapped, he would not have a limp and he would not have PTSD--both easily treatable by 2059--and his shoulder wouldn’t hurt, would have barely even scarred.

The scar is rutted and messy and John hates it. He never wipes off the mirror when he steps out of the shower to find it fogged up, and he drapes a towel around his neck when he shaves. He hates it because it is a visible sign that something horrible has happened. Something has _gone wrong_.

-

He gets interested in medicine as an undergraduate, after he tags along to his roommate’s biology lecture on a rainy afternoon and finds himself fascinated by the functions of the endocrine system, the colourful diagrams on the walls.

He toys with thoughts of becoming a doctor, but he always, _always_ comes back to history.

So he takes a couple of courses in the history of medicine, learns about the Pandemic, about Fleming’s discovery of penicillin, about how primitive medicine had been for so long. One summer he and a couple of friends from Balliol take a first aid course at St. Bartholomew’s Hospital.

When the time comes to decide what to study for his practicum, he decides to go to the Nineteenth Century, to study Victorian medicine at the University of Edinburgh. In 1877, John attends lectures by Joseph Bell, and gets to meet Arthur Conan Doyle, whose Professor Challenger novels he’s always liked.

-

After he gets back from Victorian Edinburgh he gets a research fellowship at King’s College London studying World War II army hospitals.

While John finds his work fascinating, every time he sees someone in pain with an injury that could be so easily fixed in 2059, he hurts a little deeper. At the hospital he meets a soldier named Will who lost both legs at the invasion of Normandy, and all John can do is make self-deprecating jokes and bring him the crossword puzzles. When John gets back home he checks the hospital records for 1944. Will only lived another six months.

After that John goes back to Oxford and to the 17th Century to meet anatomist John Browne. It’s an interesting project, but he gets tired of the poor hygiene and the [wigs](http://i1199.photobucket.com/albums/aa466/tartancravat/johnwig.png).

Eventually, he begins writing up a new research proposal. He decides to go to Afghanistan in 2009.

-

His drop is scheduled for 9:30 on a Thursday morning. He is frantically preparing the whole week before, reading and rereading medical textbooks, researching army protocol, early 21st century technology. Two weeks ago he got his Firearms Certificate, which isn’t strictly necessary but on which his mother insisted--”You’re going to a dangerous part of history, you should know how to defend yourself!”--though of course the trouble he would get in if he shot a contemp is almost not worth the self-defense. On Tuesday he gets his medical knowledge implants, but he still doesn’t really feel ready.

He’s not going in as an army doctor. There’s too much potential for changing things as a doctor. He might save the life of someone who was supposed to die. Or worse yet, fail to save someone who was supposed to go on to do something crucial. He poses as an inspector from army headquarters, writing a report on how operations are being conducted and what supplies are needed. It’s the perfect excuse to ask questions.

On Wednesday he goes over to Props to pick up the fake identification papers they have prepared for him, as well as other things he would have been conspicuous without in 2009.

“My name’s John Watson?” John asks the tech when he looks at the papers she hands him.

“We took it from the name on the phone,” she says, handing him the phone and a laptop computer. “It was the only one we had from the right time period.” John turns the mobile phone over to look at the engraving on the back--Harry Watson, from Clara, xxx. He wonders who Harry is supposed to be. The phone doesn’t work, of course, but at least he has it as a prop.

John looks back at the papers. They tell him he has a medical degree. His eyes flick back up to the line with his name.

Dr. John Watson.

-

Afghanistan is hot and bright and strange.

John drinks as much water as he can get, and tries to look like he knows what he’s doing.

-

He saves a man’s life. It’s a car bomb. Three dead, one with a scrap of metal in his chest. John isn’t supposed to be doing this. He’s not a real doctor, and he wasn’t meant to get this close to the violence. The violence comes to him instead.

He doesn’t know what he’s doing. He has the technical knowledge, but not the skill. He has as much first aid training as he could get, but not the training for this--this much blood, this much pain, this much dirt and horror. Memory, but no muscle memory. But somehow--afterwards, he has no idea how--John saves the man’s life.

Ten minutes later, he is shot in the left shoulder.

-

John remembers the impact, like a pinpoint bomb very small and inside his chest. He remembers the noise of the helicopter, white walls, fog.

The first time he is fully cognizant again he looks out the window of a hospital ward and sees grey skies and the dome of St Paul’s.

He is no longer in Afghanistan. He is in hospital and everything hurts and his head feels as cloudy as the sky. He closes his eyes, and tries to shut out the terror of seeing St. Paul’s Cathedral for the first time.

He’s almost surprised he recognizes it. It doesn’t exist in his time.

-

Harry Watson’s mobile phone works now, though no one rings it except John’s therapist. John would just as soon have left it broken, but his therapist insisted she have a way to contact him. He is also hoping, in a desperate but pessimistic way, that a retrieval team is coming to pull him out of 2009 and take him home. Maybe they will be able to use the phone to find him.

He is 3,500 miles away from where he is supposed to be, and he won’t be born for another eleven years. The chances of the retrieval team finding him seem slim.

-

John’s therapist makes him start a blog.

Knowing that blogs will be obsolete in a few years, this strikes John as ridiculous, but she gets hold of a working computer for him and after that he’s too polite and too listless to refuse. She tells him to write down the things that happen to him.

“Nothing happens to me,” he answers. How can it? He hasn’t even been born yet.

-

He starts trying to figure out if there are any other historians in 2009, anyone he could send a message through. Not many people do assignments later than the end of Twentieth Century, though, and everyone he knows is in the 1930s, or in 1812, or at home in 2059. Hopelessness becomes an increasingly familiar feeling.

He’s surprised when he starts seeing Christmas decorations up all over the place, both because his sense of time is so confused and because the idea of Christmas without his mum’s bland cooking or his dad’s stupid jokes or his sister’s drinking is inconceivable.

He’s living in a tiny, horrible bed-sit, and he’s so _bored_. He orders Chinese on Christmas day and eats it alone in his room, and then the frustration boils up around the rice in his stomach and he goes outside.

The air is sharp, but at least it isn’t raining. John chooses a direction at random and starts walking. At least there aren’t many people about. The weather and the holiday have driven them all indoors.

Walking is painful. It is an ever-present reminder that John is in the wrong time, the same way the calluses on his hand from his cane and the way the skin pulls against the scar on his shoulder are reminders. He walks anyway, every day, because the implant is still in his head, pulling medical advice out of nowhere whenever it is relevant. John’s brain tells him things he doesn’t really know, like how to exercise his shoulder to keep it from getting stiff and that he should keep his leg moving. He can’t ignore it, as much as he might like to curl up in bed in his pyjamas and never go out.

John knows that things have gone very wrong, and though he knows his limp isn’t real, he can’t help picking up his cane every morning, and limping through a past he can’t escape towards a future he has already lived.

-

Bill Murray comments on John’s blog, though there’s hardly anything there to comment on. John met Bill in Afghanistan, and seeing that name again reminds John why he’s here in the first place. He _was_ here to study the Royal Army Medical Corps in Afghanistan, but since that is no longer possible, there must be something else he can do. John is first and foremost a historian, and he’s living fifty years before his time. There must be _something_ here to study.

Yet as December melts away and January approaches, John finds himself wandering the streets of London, just looking at things. He’s lived in London before, though not recently, and even on the wrong side of half a century the shape of the city is the same. Some of its features are a bit different, and the fashions of the clothes its inhabitants wear are certainly different, but London itself hasn’t changed much.

John learns the London of 2009, and before long it becomes 2010, and John still has no plans.

-

He goes to a pub on New Year’s Eve. He sits at the bar, orders a beer, and reads the newspaper. A lot of the news doesn’t mean much to him, except as half-remembered dates and names from history tutorials.

John’s left hand has started to shake. It didn’t do that at the beginning, when he first woke up in hospital and when he first ventured out into the city. John’s not sure what it means, that his unreal symptoms of an impossible problem are increasing. Periodically, he has to let go of the corner of the paper and curl his fist against his leg.

A woman sits down next to him.

John doesn’t interact with people very often. He feels wrong here, and he notices the wrongness less if he’s on his own, if he lives in his own little bubble. Sometimes the loneliness outweighs the wrongness, though. John’s not sure whether this is one of those times, but then he turns and looks at the woman on his left.

She looks like any of the women John knows at Oxford. Her blonde hair catches the warm amber light, and it’s cut in much the same generic style female historians wear because it works for almost any era. She looks sensible and fairly ordinary, the way all historians have to to blend in, and for a moment John dares to hope.

“Happy New Year,” she says to him, flagging the bartender down. She orders a rum and coke, and John watches the way her fingers leave prints in the condensation on the glass.

“Happy New Year,” John echoes.

She sips her rum and coke and looks at him. Hope is still scratching at the inside of John’s stomach, but it’s not a happy hope. John doesn’t believe in it.

“You here alone?” she asks. Not suggestive--conversational, maybe a little bored.

He nods. “John,” he says, offering his hand.

“Catherine.” She takes another sip of her drink. “So what do you do?”

What does he do? Is he a soldier, doctor, historian? At the moment he doesn’t _do_ anything. He should say he’s a doctor, that would be most in keeping with his identity here, but it doesn’t matter, does it? John’s face cracks into a smile.

“I’m a bit of a jack of all trades, really.”

“Master of none?” Catherine asks with a smile.

“I wouldn’t say that, exactly. I’m a historian, mainly.” John knows this doesn’t mean in 2009 what it means in 2059, that it makes him sound a bit dull when in reality there is nothing dull about going to a war zone and getting shot. The aftermath is pretty boring, of course.

“Oh? What’s your specialty?”

“History of medicine.”

“And what are you doing here alone on New Year’s Eve, Jack?”

John looks at the row of bottles behind the bar, trying not to think about anything too hard. “I’ve got nowhere better to be,” he says.

And when Catherine gets up to go meet her friends a few minutes later, John knows for sure that she’s not there for him. She’s not his retrieval team, not there to take him home to his own time. John’s hope dies, quickly, painfully, and inevitably.

-

And then one day John hears his name. He’s walking in the park, and he’s wrapped up in his thoughts, but he’s so on edge, so desperate to be found, that he turns immediately. John is such a common name, there’s no chance it’s meant for him, but then he hears “John Watson”, and that’s who he is here, that’s _his_ name. And a man in a striped tie is walking towards him, saying, “Stamford. Mike Stamford.”

John’s so shocked, so utterly shocked, that he barely manages to force out an answer. “Yes, sorry. Yes, Mike, hello.” They shake hands, and Mike is _real_ , a real person who, like John, hasn’t been born yet. Someone who _knows_ John. John’s so happy he doesn’t pause to wonder how Mike knows he’s using the name “Watson”.

“I know, I got fat. I heard you were abroad somewhere getting shot at. What happened?”

“I got shot,” John says, hoping that explains what he’s doing in the wrong country.

He plays it carefully as they walk to the Criterion and get coffees, even though his stomach is jumping against his skin. It’s always dangerous, talking to a historian met by accident in the past. John isn’t sure Mike is here as his retrieval team, and if not he could be from a different time--John’s future or John’s past.

“Still at Bart’s, then?” John asks. John met Mike when they took a first aid course at St. Bartholomew’s Hospital together. Mike had developed an interest in the history of Bart’s, so it’s possible he’s in 2010 to look into that--Bart’s is within walking distance.

“Teaching now. Bright young things like we used to be--God, I hate them. What about you? Just staying in town while you get yourself sorted?”

John tries to parse the words, tries to figure out whether Mike is here as part of his retrieval team and just trying to figure out what’s been happening to John, or whether this is genuinely a coincidence. Either way, maybe John can get him to send a message back to Oxford. “Can’t afford London on an army pension,” John says, meaning, _I can’t last much longer here_.

“And you can't bear to be anywhere else. That's not the John Watson I know.” That time, John registers the name, and wonders what it means. If Mike is addressing him by the name he’s using here, that implies that Mike _is_ from the retrieval team, though why he should bother is less certain. But why would Mike be posing as a teacher at Bart’s, if he’s only here to find John? And why haven’t they already gone to the drop and back to Oxford?

“I’m not the John Watson you know,” John says. He’s not even sure what he means by that, but in many ways it’s true.

“Couldn't Harry help?”

Who? John has no idea who Mike’s talking about, but he plays along. What else can he do? “Like that's going to happen.” It seems unlikely John’s going to get Harry’s help, given John doesn’t know who Harry is.

“I dunno, get a flatshare or something?”

John’s heart sinks. If Mike is suggesting solutions to John’s problems here, in London in 2010, he can’t be from the retrieval team. He’s not here to take John home to Oxford. Unless there’s some plan John doesn’t know about. Which is possible. Hopefully.

“Who'd want me for a flatmate?” A trapped, depressed, unemployed historian who has no idea what people are talking about half the time because he’s from fifty years in the future? John’s not sure he even wants a flatmate.

“You're the second person to say that to me today,” Mike says.

“Who was the first?”

-

John follows Mike to St. Bart’s, because what else can he do? He can’t lose this chance, even if Mike’s not from the retrieval team. On the way, he tries to figure out what Mike’s assignment is, asks careful questions that don’t really get him useful answers. John’s just about to tell Mike outright that he’s stuck here, when Mike pushes through a door into a lab, and John looks around in surprise. He knows this room, recognizes the shape of it and the countertops, but--

“Bit different from my day,” he says.

“You’ve no idea,” Mike says, and, well, John knows how much of a difference fifty years makes.

“Mike, can I use your phone?” For the first time, John registers the presence of another man in the room. Bent over a microscope, dark curly hair and pale skin. Sharp, in more ways than one. John leans absently on his cane and watches.

When Mike fails to produce his phone, John offers his own for the man’s use. He’s not entirely certain why he does it. An impulse, that even in the moment feels significant. “Here’s an old friend of mine, John Watson,” Mike says, and he seems to stress the “Watson” in a way that makes no sense to John.

“Afghanistan or Iraq?” the pale man asks, concentrating on tapping out a text on John’s mobile.

“Sorry?” John glances at Mike, who looks strangely smug, like he _knows_ exactly what he’s doing. What is he doing?

“Which was it, Afghanistan or Iraq?”

“Afghanistan. Sorry, how did you--?”

But then he doesn’t answer John’s implied question, just hands the phone back to John and walks away, talking to the woman with the coffee instead. Finally, he seems to switch his attention back to John. “How do you feel about the violin?”

“Sorry, what?”

“I play the violin when I’m thinking. Sometimes I don’t talk for days on end. Would that bother you? Potential flatmates should know the worst about each other.”

“You told him about me?” John asks Mike, utterly bewildered but with a thrum of excitement under his skin. Something is happening here, and John doesn’t know what it is but it feels like the pull at the back of his stomach when the net opens and he steps through, into the past.

“Not a word,” Mike answers.

“Then who said anything about flatmates?” John asks.

“I did. I told Mike this morning that I must be a difficult man to find a flatmate for. And now here he is, just after lunch with an old friend clearly just home from military service in Afghanistan.”

“How did you know about Afghanistan?

“I've got my eye on a nice little place in central London. Together we ought to be able to afford it. We'll meet there tomorrow evening, 7 o'clock. Sorry, got to dash. I think I left my riding crop in the mortuary.” John turns as the man sweeps past him, thinking vaguely, _riding crop in the mortuary? And he thinks violin-playing and silence are “the worst”?_

John is bewildered by the entire situation--by the fact that this man, who hasn’t even introduced himself, seems to think that John will agree to live with him, by the fact that Mike seems to be going along with it. John hopes there’s some plan here, some reason they’re not dragging him straight back to Oxford and fixing his damn leg.

“Is that it?” John asks, and it’s not really directed at anyone in particular, but his new flatmate, _apparently_ , seems to think it’s for him.

“Is that what?”

“We've only just met, and we’re going to go and look at a flat.”

“Problem?”

John glances at Mike. “We don't know a thing about each other. I don't know where we're meeting. I don't even know your name.” Those aren’t the only things wrong with this situation, but these are the problems most immediately fixable, assuming Mike is going to continue to not tell him what’s going on.

“I know you're an army doctor and you've been invalided home from Afghanistan. I know you've got a brother who's worried about you, but you won't go to him for help because you don't approve of him, possibly because he's an alcoholic, more likely because he recently walked out on his wife. And I know your therapist thinks your limp's psychosomatic, quite correctly, I'm afraid. That's enough to be going on with, don't you think?”

The part about Afghanistan is--well, true, for a given value of truth that only really exists from a certain point of view. John has no idea where Sherlock got the brother, the alcoholism, or the brother’s wife, but he’s intrigued. This man is _fascinating_ and a little dangerous, never more so than now, when he’s just told John everything about himself with complete confidence, despite the fact that most of it isn’t quite true. John has the impression that if he weren’t _wrong_ , if he were actually an army doctor born in 1971, and not an impossibility, all this personal information pulled out of thin air would be correct. The part about his limp _is_ true, of course. The part about the sibling with the alcoholism....

“The name's Sherlock Holmes and the address is 221B Baker Street. Afternoon.”

And suddenly, John understands. Sort of.

-

“He’s always like that,” Mike says.

“Mike, what are you--?” He jerks his thumb at the door. “Was that _the_ Sherlock Holmes?”

“Yep. Sherlock Holmes in the flesh.”

“Is that why I’m here? We’re not on the way back to Oxford right now because I’m supposed to study Sherlock Holmes? Whose idea was that?”

“Did you ever read about Sherlock Holmes, John?”

John adjusts his weight, trying to remember. “No, I don’t think so. Maybe someone told me a couple of stories when I was a kid. But I don’t remember them very well.”

Mike nods, considering that. “Probably for the best. How much do you know about him?”

“He’s a pretty famous detective. Solved all the cases no one else could solve.” John shrugs. “That’s about it.”

“That’s all?” Mike asks. John wonders what he’s fishing for. “You don’t remember any of the other characters?”

“No.”

“Perfect,” Mike says, grinning.

“Perfect? I’ve been stuck here for months with a mess of a shoulder and this damn leg, figuring I’d be stuck here forever with shit medicine that can’t even fix a bloody psychosomatic limp. What’s going on? Because it doesn’t look perfect to me!” His grip on his cane is so tight that he can barely feel the tips of his fingers, and all the frustration he’s been shoving aside for so long seems to be clawing its way up the back of his throat.

Mike’s face sobers, and he leans back, looking a little guilty. “I’m sorry, John,” he says quietly. “Look, there’s not much I can tell you without causing some serious problems. But we’ve got a rather unprecedented situation here, and everyone back in Oxford is working to figure out how this happened and whether it’s really possible. You’re not alone, John. You’ve not been abandoned. But we can’t take you home.”

“Oh, thanks, that’s cryptic,” John mutters.

“After you went to Afghanistan, Mr. Dunworthy made some discoveries. He found coincidences--too many coincidences for any of it to be coincidental at all. Honestly, I can’t tell you more than that.”

“What stupid idea has Dunworthy got now? He’s not supposed to let historians get injured and trapped in the past just for the sake of a bloody experiment!”

“John, Mr. Dunworthy is the head of Time Travel; he knows what he’s doing. I’m sorry about your shoulder and your leg. There was nothing we could do about that. But please--just go along with it. Meet Sherlock tomorrow. I know he seems... well, mad, but it would be very very dangerous to take you back to Oxford right now.”

John lets out a slow breath, and looks around the lab, blinking against the pressure of feelings more mixed than any he’s ever had before. The picture, coloured liquids in beakers, Mike’s very serious expression--everything blurs until it might almost be the same lab that John sometimes hung out in that summer at St. Bart’s in 2042.

“How dangerous?” he asks, trying to get hold of himself, bring everything back into focus.

“We’re not sure. It could create an incongruity.”

John’s head swims a bit. “You’re sure you can’t tell me more?”

“We don’t know whether that would be safe. Best not to chance it.”

“Right. Okay. I’m going to... go, I think. Will you be here?”

“I’ll be checking in.”

“Okay.” John suspects he’s a bit in shock, but he turns toward the door and, well, he’s functioning.

“You’ll be at Baker Street at 7?” Mike asks tentatively.

“Yeah,” John says heavily. “I’ll be there.”

-

So he goes home and googles Sherlock Holmes. There’s nothing on the internet about _The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes_ , so it must be early in his career. Unless the stories were published after his death, anyway--John doesn’t know much about the books, how close to fact they were or who wrote them. A website does come up, though--“The Science of Deduction.” That sounds vaguely familiar. It also sounds vaguely ridiculous--tell a software designer by his tie and an airline pilot by his left thumb, really? The thing about being a historian, though, is that John often has the benefit of hindsight even in the moment. He knows Sherlock Holmes goes down in history as a great detective, so there must be something to the things he says on his website.

The light is fading to grey by the time John gets to Baker Street the next day. Sherlock is getting out of a taxi, and they greet each other slightly awkwardly, make small talk that somehow doesn’t seem small.

John knows he has to be here, at least for now. He has not reconciled himself to the idea, but for now there is nothing to do but go where “Sherlock, please” leads him. Maybe that’s why he barely blinks when Sherlock asks him to come to a crime scene.

Just when John is about to resign himself to being “the sitting down type”, Sherlock steps back into the room. “You’re a doctor,” he says.

“Yes.” John has an encyclopedic knowledge--literally--of medicine implanted in his head. He may not be a doctor in spirit--he never took the Hippocratic Oath, though he knows what it says--but when he needs to know how to do something, that knowledge will be there. Even if he doesn’t entirely trust himself to know it in advance.

“Any good?”

“Very good.” What else can he say?

And when Sherlock asks, “Want to see some more--?” More violence, more death, more trouble, more adrenaline and the lurch of joy the moment the net opens, at the start of an adventure--the joy he’s feeling now, even mixed with fear and anger as it is--

“Oh, God, yes.”

-

John wishes, now, that he had ever got around to reading about Sherlock Holmes. There’s always something, on every time travel assignment he’s done, that he wishes desperately he’d researched beforehand, something he never would have considered that turns out to be crucial. Like how you always remember to research butlers and fish forks when going to the Nineteenth Century, but when you actually get there you realize you should have been researching how to properly conduct yourself with a woman in an improper situation. This time, the crucial piece of missing information is Sherlock Holmes.

Though Mike seems to think it’s a good thing that John doesn’t know the stories. Oxford usually enforces obsessive research before any assignment, so this seems strange. And now John is forced to guess at Sherlock’s occupation. “I’d say... private detective,” he suggests. “But the police don’t go to private detectives.”

“I’m a consulting detective. Only one in the world. I invented the job.”

John’s not surprised, of course. He’s aware there was something which set Sherlock Holmes apart from other detectives. But the feeling of being the object of Sherlock’s deduction is surprising--John had rather thought of Sherlock Holmes as the subject of cosy detective novels, not as someone sharp, someone with the ability to break open your mind or your past and see what’s inside it. “When I met you for the first time yesterday, I said Afghanistan or Iraq. You looked surprised.”

“Yes, how did you know?”

“I didn’t know, I saw. Your haircut, the way you hold yourself says military. But your conversation as you entered the room said trained at Bart’s. So, army doctor, obvious. Your face is tanned, but no tan above the wrists. You’ve been abroad, but not sunbathing. Your limp’s really bad when you walk, but you don’t ask for a chair when you stand, like you’ve forgotten about it, so it’s at least partly psychosomatic. That says the original circumstances of the injury were traumatic. Wounded in action, then. Wounded in action, suntan--Afghanistan or Iraq.”

All true, in the way time travel distorts truth, puts things that should be true slightly out of place.

“You said I had a therapist,” John points out.

“You’ve got a psychosomatic limp, of course you’ve got a therapist. Then there’s your brother.”

What? Why does he keep implying that John has a brother? Even Mike had talked about someone named Harry who doesn’t exist. But of course Sherlock has a logic behind it, and though John’s existence confounds logic, he can’t help but be impressed by how confident Sherlock is, how faultless his logic is.

It’s the phone, of course. John sort of wishes they hadn’t named him Watson, hadn’t decided it only made sense for him to have a phone with an engraving if the engraving bore some relation to him. It’s a bit mind-blowing that chance circumstance created such a train of logic for Sherlock to follow--that this was the only phone Props had that wouldn’t be an anachronism--and now Sherlock thinks he knows all these things about John and John’s family.

“Harry Watson. Clearly a family member who’s given you his old phone. Not your father, this is a young man’s gadget. Could be a cousin, but you’re a war hero who can’t find a place to live. Unlikely you’ve got any extended family--” Or any family at all, here. “--certainly not one you’re close to. So, brother it is. Now, Clara, who’s Clara? Three kisses says it’s a romantic attachment. Expense of the phone says wife, not girlfriend. Must have given it to him recently, this model’s only six months old. Marriage in trouble, then. Six months on, he’s just giving it away. If she’d left him, he would have kept it. People do, sentiment. But no, he wanted rid of it. He left her. He gave the phone to you, that says he wants you to stay in touch. You’re looking for cheap accommodation, but you’re not going to your brother for help. That says you’ve got problems with him. Maybe you liked his wife. Maybe you don’t like his drinking.”

“How can you possibly know about the drinking?” John asks, before he even thinks about it. His heart is thumping against his stomach, and he imagines Sherlock can see it beating painfully fast, feels transparent. It’s coincidence, of course it is--Sherlock can’t possibly know that John’s sister is an alcoholic. It’s complete coincidence that she is, that the real Harry Watson was too.

Sherlock’s deductions about the phone and the drinking have nothing to do with John’s sister, of course, but they still make John feel shaky and naked, make him more afraid than he’s ever been before that someone is going to _find out_ , that Sherlock will realize that John doesn’t know things he should know, knows other things he shouldn’t, isn’t in the records he should be, and doesn’t exist. There is no John Watson, and John’s afraid Sherlock will deduce that.

“That...was amazing.” He already has complete faith in the “science of deduction”, but it certainly isn’t the kind of faith that comforts--it’s terrifying.

And Sherlock seems surprised. “Do you think so?”

“Of course it was. It was extraordinary, it was quite extraordinary.” Even the things that aren’t true about John are true about someone, and John’s never seen anyone pick apart a person the way Sherlock’s just done. It makes him terrified for his own security here, but it also makes him feel a bit safe, knowing Sherlock turns this skill, this more than skill, on criminals.

“That’s not what people normally say.”

“What do people normally say?”

“Piss off.”

The terror and the wonder in John’s stomach blends into sympathy and amusement.

-

When Sherlock asks if he got anything wrong, John decides just to go with it, tell Sherlock he’s got it all right. He makes up something about how long Harry and Clara have been having problems, and he confirms, painfully, that Harry drinks.

And then he tells Sherlock that Harry’s short for Harriet. It’s easier to pretend his sister’s called Harry than to pretend he knows what it’s like to have a brother. It’s also just a little bit satisfying to prod Sherlock’s ego, to tell him he got something wrong, even after such a brief acquaintance.

He follows Sherlock into the crime scene, and it’s like stepping into a detective novel. Watching Sherlock make deductions about the corpse is even stranger than listening to the deductions about John, because he knows Sherlock’s right about all of them, and because a dead woman in an empty house is more mysterious than John will ever be.

When Sherlock asks him to examine the body he’s seized by momentary panic, but then the medical textbook inside his head comes to life, and he manages to diagnose asphyxiation. He doesn’t know he knows these things until suddenly he does, and it’s nerve-wracking, hoping the implant will continue to work properly. Sherlock seems satisfied, though.

Afterwards John steps out into the street and looks around, feeling blindsided and looking for Sherlock mostly because there is nothing else to do, no reason to be here if not to study Sherlock.

“He’s gone,” the police sergeant says.

“Sherlock Holmes?” He’s not going to make this easy, if he leaves John behind.

“Yeah, he just took off. He does that.” John considers this statement and wonders how well this woman--Sherlock had called her Sally--knows Sherlock. Whether she’s a regular character in _The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes_. Whether she’d like the way she’s portrayed. She clearly doesn’t like Sherlock.

“You're not his friend. He doesn't have friends. So who are you?”

“I'm...I'm nobody.”

And then she tries to warn John away. Says, “One day we'll be standing round a body, and Sherlock Holmes will be the one that put it there.”

John knows that isn’t true. Sherlock Holmes would not be recognised as one of the greatest detectives that ever lived if he had been a murderer. That certainty gives John a strange sort of insight. He knows Sherlock Holmes isn’t really the person his colleagues see, and knowing that makes John more willing to stick to Sherlock, to get to know him. Sherlock may well be capable of exposing the historian’s greatest secret, but John has a similar power--he knows who Sherlock will become.

Sherlock Holmes is not a psychopath. One day, he will be well remembered.

-

And then John gets kidnapped.

It’s like something out of an old spy film, phones ringing and a dark voice on the other end. John is much more worried about the owner of that voice than he is about Sherlock. This man, who knows John has a connection to Sherlock less than twenty-four hours after their meeting and is watching him on CCTV cameras, clearly has the power to unravel John’s identity. Sherlock has the power to deduce John’s identity, but with Sherlock--well, John has trust issues, but maybe with Sherlock the issue is with his excess of trust, rather than his lack.

John is worried, but not afraid. “You don’t seem very frightening,” he says, and he means it. This is all a little too melodramatic, a little too like playing at being a supervillain.

“What is your connection to Sherlock Holmes?” the man asks.

“I don’t have one. I barely know him. I met him... yesterday.” Time is sometimes hard to judge, for John. In some ways, John met Sherlock as a very small child, when some family friend read him a story that John has now forgotten. Even judging yesterday as their first meeting, it seems both very long ago and impossibly recent.

If he were being honest, of course, John wouldn’t be able to deny that a connection between him and Sherlock Holmes exists. There’s a reason Oxford is forcing him to study Sherlock, even if he hasn’t yet figured out what that reason is.

“And since yesterday, you’ve moved in with him, and now you’re solving crimes together.” John feels “moved in” is rather overstating the matter. “Might we expect a happy announcement by the end of the week?”

John had rather thought 2010 was more conservative than this. Why does everyone keep implying that he and Sherlock are a couple?

When the man offers him money, John declines. He can’t take money from 2010 back to 2059, and he doesn’t see the point of accumulating a lot of money here. With any luck, he won’t be here very long. And, well, he denies it, but perhaps he is just a little bit loyal. Loyal to a storybook detective whose stories he’s never read.

The moment John realizes that this man has his therapist’s notes, John really begins to believe he’s in danger. Not physical danger--that doesn’t phase him, and unless there’s a sword hidden in that umbrella this man appears to be unarmed. For perhaps the first time in his career, John is truly afraid of being found out. Oh, he’s been afraid of getting things wrong before, of not knowing things he ought to know or knowing things he ought not to. He’s been afraid of being suspected as a spy, as an impostor, as a madman.

This is the first time John has ever been afraid of being exposed as a time traveller.

“Could it be that you’ve decided to trust Sherlock Holmes of all people?”

If this man is an enemy of Sherlock Holmes, perhaps it’s in John’s best interests to trust Sherlock.

-

Talking to Sherlock about real life is a little like the pot calling the kettle black. Real life isn’t eating dinner with a storybook detective fifty years in the past. John does believe that people don’t have archenemies in real life, but that isn’t to say he sees himself as a good example of what real life is like.

Then they are running through the streets, and John throws himself completely into fiction.

He doesn’t have time to analyze the _running_ , can’t stop to think about why or how Sherlock Holmes cured his limp.

-

John is not honestly sure why he still has his gun. When his personal effects were returned to him when he was released from hospital, it was there, in with his phone, the clothes he came through the net in, and the broken laptop he only kept because Props would kill him for losing it. He knows how illegal guns are, knows he should have had to give up the gun when he was invalided home. Yet he still has it.

And as he sits in the back of a taxi, tracking the pink phone’s GPS on Sherlock’s netbook and frantically trying to phone Lestrade, he’s glad.

As John runs through dark hallways looking for Sherlock, the gun tucked into his trousers feels like the perversely comforting weight of danger.

The moment John realizes he’s in the wrong building, standing inside the reflection and unable to help the real thing, the identical room across two layers of glass and empty space, he realizes what this feels like. This knowledge, that Sherlock is in danger, that Sherlock is about to poison himself, that John will have to use the gun--it’s familiar. It’s like everything falling into place. It’s like stepping into the past and uncovering one of history’s secrets. Something lost, something unrecorded, something no one in John’s own time knows.

“You’re under stress right now, and your hand is perfectly steady,” he told John.

John’s not a real soldier, but he has training and he has certainty, and he has the sudden joy of filling a need. Satisfaction and purpose hold his hand steady as he takes aim, and adrenaline gets him out of the room even before Sherlock reaches the other window.

-

John watches Sherlock as he sits in the back of the ambulance, draped in an orange blanket, and talks to Lestrade. The adrenaline is still humming inside him, but he holds himself still, watches as Sherlock rattles off a deduction--inaudible to John--and then catches sight of John. He sees the moment Sherlock realises, and it’s gloriously satisfying to know he’s _surprised_ Sherlock.

Sherlock surprises him in return when he asks, “Are you all right?”

“Yes, of course I’m all right.” Possibly for the first time in months, this is true. John is stuck in 2010, but it’s all right.

John has never had to face the idea that he might be addicted to time travel. It never occurred to him that the limp, the tremor in his hand, are symptoms of withdrawal, that he can’t live without adventure, discovery, danger, impossibility.

If he had thought about it, about how he _needs_ the rush of stepping into the past, it never would have occurred to him that something else might fill that need.

Later, John will be slightly horrified by how really _all right_ he is, having just shot and killed a man. In the moment, he’s simply overjoyed to realise he can survive here in 2010--more than survive, with Sherlock.

**Author's Note:**

> I had a hard time figuring out how to work the AU of this. I reread _To Say Nothing of the Dog_ before writing this, and realised both Sherlock Holmes and Arthur Conan Doyle are mentioned in it, so I spent a lot of time trying to find interesting ways to explain this. I finally settled on Arthur Conan Doyle being remembered for something besides Sherlock Holmes (Professor Challenger), and I treated the Sherlock Holmes John meets in 2010 as the Sherlock Holmes mentioned in _To Say Nothing of the Dog_. I just ignored the fact that Harry Watson comments on John’s blog. :P
> 
> This was intended to be a lot longer. I was going to write it through the rest of series 1 of Sherlock, and in fact I have an extra 2,000 words already written, but then I decided this made a good stopping point. I have more ideas for this ‘verse, so at some point I may write a sequel. No promises. ;)
> 
> The title is from _A Study in Scarlet_ : “They lay all the evidence before me, and I am generally able, by the help of my knowledge of the history of crime, to set them straight. There is a strong family resemblance about misdeeds, and if you have all the details of a thousand at your finger ends, it is odd if you can't unravel the thousand and first.”


End file.
